Remnants vs. ARM

Mediocre is the word that springs to mind, and not (primarily) because
it was a bit gloomy and chilly out. It was not that we did anything
particularly badly, but with only 92 to defend off 13 eight-ball overs
from our batting effort, it was going to be a tough ask of the bowlers
against ARM's no-nonsense batting style.

Starting with the pink ball to combat the clouds, Todd Bridgman and I
went to see if we could score a little faster than last Wednesday. We
started OK, before Todd was bowled
(for 5 off 8 balls) trying to up the run rate towards
the end of the second over. John Young
(11 off 17 balls) hit some solid strokes through the
offside, but with some rain tailing off as we started and leaving the
outfield wet, we had to run, at one point running a full "in the park" four.
Andrew Granville notified me I was two short of the agreed
retirement score, to which I responded by failing to pull a rather
good short delivery from ARM's captain Adnan, and was caught by their
keeper (for 38 off 34 balls).
The rest of the innings saw regular wickets, a few good
hits from Pete Ames (9* off 6 balls)
towards the end; but in the end the second highest
scorer was extras, with 12. Like I said, not terrible, just mediocre.

The pink ball was a bit on the damp side, so we found a used, but
promising, neon orange ball.
Huw Wallis took it and delivered three superb overs (1/16),
removing one of their heavy-hitting batters via one of those
clearly-in-front, back-leg, basically-have-to-walk-it-was-s-obviously-out
LBWs. Fresh from Australia and a Nature paper,
Chris Clarkson (2/23) was also off to a great start,
with a straightforward catch taken by John Young at cover.
Another wicket followed in his next over, this time bowled.
All this came at a price since he was barely able to walk afterwards,
paying for at least a decade of non-cricket action,
presumably sunning it up with a stubby-cooler in Queensland.
Huw and Chris had bowled rather well, but after 6 reasonable overs
ARM had put on 41, so were nearly half-way to their target.
To their credit, while the ARM batting style varies from player to player,
they all know what to do with a bad ball, and they did that with
aplomb tonight.

Andrew Granville (0/17) struggled to find a good length
[He was perhaps distracted by the fact that he'd been immortalised
in the scorebook as "Randall" - ed.], and thus
suffered a bit of clubbing,
including at least a few broken tiles on the clubhouse roof - sorry Dave!
Pete Ames (1/22) threw down some good, if unorthodox, leggies,
getting a wicket for his efforts.
By this point however, with ARM regularly scoring over ten in an over,
it was painfully clear we simply didn't have enough runs on the board.
Thus, the winning runs were hit in the 9th over
and we all went home.